Soon everyone in Feathertown is trying to figure out a way to cash in. 'You're that famous painting, the naked chick standing on the shell,' her friend Dovey gushes. During the hullabaloo that follows, Dellarobia's image goes viral on the Internet as a mashup 'butterfly Venus.' The usually passive Cub stands up in church to say that his wife has had a vision that something major was about to happen on their property, and they shouldn't start logging up there. Her discovery of the 'lake of fire' ushers in change on all fronts.

It doesn't help that she and Cub live on her in-laws' property. She resents her mother-in-law, Hester, and her father-in-law, Bear, who is about to sell the forest on the family sheep farm for logging after a record rainy stretch has depleted the local economy. The pace of the novel bogs down as Kingsolver gives us a lengthy exploration of Dellarobia's thwarted energies (pregnant at 17, she marries instead of heading to college, then loses that baby). 'Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road.' Convinced this 'brightness rising' was there to save her from betraying Cub, Dellarobia hurries back down the mountain to her vinyl-sided ranch house and a life 'measured in half dollars and clipped coupons and culled hopes flattened between uninsulated walls.' She sees millions of migrating monarch butterflies assembled into what appears to be a glowing 'lake of fire.' between tomatoes and a ladybug.' She is determined to have 'this one sweet chance,' even if it means risking her family and reputation.Īt the end of her climb, feet blistering in stylish boots bought secondhand for $6, Dellarobia stops in wonder. Dellarobia glories in her long, straight red hair, which her lover-to-be describes as 'somewhere between a stop sign and sunset. Kingsolver opens 'Flight Behavior' in a frenzy, as Dellarobia Turnbow, a one-time rebel girl with two young children and a husband hopelessly browbeaten by his mother, rushes up a mountain hollow to a tryst with a younger man. 'Flight Behavior,' her provocative eighth, imagines global warming shifting the traditional winter habitat of monarch butterflies from a mountaintop village in Mexico to an Appalachian valley. Barbara Kingsolver has gained a loyal readership and much critical praise for her emotionally resonant, socially aware novels.

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